


Dormé/Amidala

by Pandora



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 08:50:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4298397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pandora/pseuds/Pandora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are unexpected benefits when Dormé serves as Amidala's decoy--for both of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dormé/Amidala

When Amidala arrives in the bedroom, I don’t look away from my datapad to see her. She is only a blurredsoft shadow nearby as I continue to flick through a column of text, perched in a crushed velvet-plump heap of skirts on the settee. The firebug-glow letters make up a memo from one of the subcommittees, and I don’t pause long enough to read them. I could tell, from the title, what it was about. Amidala could speak, but she waits in the smooth whispering silence, and I’m relieved—yes, of all the feelings I would prefer, I’m relieved that she hasn’t. I don’t know if I can endure to hear her voice break the air.

She has just returned from the dinner-meeting at the new restaurant in the senate district, the one with diamond-glass floors and gold dust glittering in the air. Some of the Chandrilan aides were talking about it only the other day. It sounded too faddish to me—but I don’t know if Amidala has the same opinion. She hasn’t discussed it with me.

But I know that whatever she thinks in private, she smiled while she sipped rose-water from a diamond-lily glass, and tried to persuade Senator Owain Dare to have the same opinions, and the same feelings, she has about the war.

“We can’t know when it will be our world,” she would have said, giving her voice a bruised throb. Her raingrey dress would have been a moth-pale blur inside her protocol droid’s bright skin as he hovered nearby. “I had to learn that the hard and painful way.”

Since I have the option to speak first, I close the datapad, trapping all those words inside, and look up at her. She is standing in front of the picture window, and the inkstained crowded night outside. “Oh, I see you’ve returned. I hope your evening went well.”

 _Milady_ , I think next after that. It is only her title, the address I used only this morning, when I helped her into the dress she had chosen for that subcommittee meeting, and worked over her hair. It was what the recently elected Queen, Apailana, called her during that earnestly pleading holocall she insisted on that arrived during luncheon. But when I say it, the word sighs out into a kiss. That’s how it is when you love someone.

But I understand that isn’t what she wants to hear now. “I can’t complain,” she says, with a twitched shrug. “He heard me out.”

“That’s what I had hoped to hear.” I set the datapad down, without care or thought, down on the settee, and stand up.

This nightsky velvet dress was made for her by a seamstress in the commerce district in Theed, who sewed all of the tiny lake pearls, one by one by one, and tatted the snarled lace for the cuffs in the ancient classical style. She won’t know that Amidala has never worn it—that while it doesn't fit her, it does fit me, since it was made for a woman who has to stoop and hunch down to match her. No one has ever noticed me enough to know that I am inches taller than Amidala, though Captain Typho has still worried over it. But now that I’m here, in this room, in this apartment, where it isn’t a secret, I have straightened up to my true height.

“The food was good enough." She pulls the dark theatre stage curtains shut across the windows, and turns on the white light on the corner lamp with a click. “Senator Dare seemed to think I was suitably impressed with it--”

“That was why he got the reservations,” I say.

“Well, yes,” she says, and she relaxes her mouth into a smile, into the look I have always wanted and hoped for the most. She is wearing her hair in one of her simpler, and (of course, purposefully so) innocent styles, and her face is still lightly glowing with moondust powder. I know she made the impression she wanted to with Senator Dare.

When I sit down at the vanity table, she floats into place behind me, and I hardly have the chance to feel her fingers as she finds the first insect-legged pin. I wait patiently, watching her reflection move inside the glare of the mirror, while she pulls all of them out, and drops them into a spilled teeth chattering heap on the table. My hair falls down my back.

“Thank you,” I say, still watching the mirror. “But you didn’t have to do that.”

“I know,” she says. I can smell the lake rose perfume she has sent from Naboo before she steps away. “But I wanted to.”

When I turn to see her, she is looking down towards the floor. Her face is flushed a feversore rose petal pink, and her nipples are clenched stiff, and: “Oh, I shouldn’t have gone on about that dinner. I can order something in for you.”

“I would appreciate that,” I say. My heart has clenched, but I sound serious, and gracious, the way my grandmother has always addressed her housemaidens.

Amidala doesn’t have to say anything more. She only adjusts the pearl necklace I chose to match this dress, leaning close enough to kiss me. When she looks up, and I can feel her breathe, I think—though only for as long as an instant, an instant--that she will, but she only steps back and leaves in a tail swishing of skirts. She walks the way I have done for years.

\--

This afternoon, I went to the offices in this dress while Amidala had a private meeting with Anakin Skywalker. After I had closed the door, I sat down behind her glossed-bright Naboo pine desk. I opened an urgent, important file on the datapad, and then I sat there. I pushed the chair around towards the huge blushed-warm sky outside the window, and then back around towards the blank paper white wall, and then to the door. I played with the pearl necklace, smearing it with my fingerprints. I sneaked in a tiptoe out to the fresher, and then returned. The staff (as I had known, even if Amidala hadn’t) had left me alone.

While Amidala sat with Anakin (her lover, her little boy, her _husband_ ) on the couch in the warm air floating in from the balcony. She listened while he spilled out an edited version of the siege he had just returned from on the Outer Rim. She nodded along with him. The protocol droid brought out a tray with several glasses of amber tea.

Then, while I wore her dress, and her name, she had followed him into her bedroom. His fingers shivered as he helped her climb out of her dress. She tasted the tea once again when he kissed her, and she glowed under the sunlight on the bed as she took him, and held him, between her legs. He might have actually broken into fat summer raindrop tears.

When he came, when she pushed him into an orgasm, I would have pushed up to my feet and gone to hover at the window. My right fist had clenched into a rock at my side.

\--

The food arrives with an interesting and unusual speed—Amidala must have used her most commanding voice for the comm. call. I have dinner at the main table, where she has received her most dear, important colleagues in the Senate, the few she actually trusts. Amidala has taken her seat across from me, but she doesn’t eat. I keep my outward attention on my food, but I know she is watching me, the way I have always watched her. The rest of the apartment is dark and empty; Moteé is downstairs in our quarters, and the droid must have powered down. Amidala only jumps up, after I finish my modest glass of red silk wine, to pour me another.

When she hands the glass to me, I look up at her. “Thank you,” I said, and take a dainty small sip to properly feel and taste the wine before I swallow it.

I had a proper university education—unlike Moteé, who only ever learned to write in a romantic, swooping hand, and to make a perfect curtsy, I studied rhetoric and philosophy. But she knew what I have had to learn—the etiquette is only ever a game. That’s the first rule. You just need to figure out what role you have to play in it.

Amidala takes my plate, before I have to ask her, and vanishes into the dark. I lean against the bone-clenched back of the chair, and finish the last sip of wine in my glass. The corset in the dress clenches when I exhale, but I make the attempt to relax.

When I look back, I see that Amidala has returned to the room. She stands with her hands folded at her waist—the way a handmaiden is trained to stand, the way she learned (I know, even though we never speak of the past) to hide herself when she was the Queen. Her voice is an echo of the one I use when she says: “I’m sorry, milady.”

“What are you sorry for?” I say—and though I’m only confused, I sound haughty-cold and bored. She sinks down onto her knees, and lets her hair fall down into a dark mourning veil over her face, and she sounds relieved when she says:

“There’s so much I don’t know where I’ll end once I’ve begun.” She crawls through the few feet between us and leans against my legs. “But you know, and you can forgive me.”

She kisses my foot—or rather the toe of my purple silk shoe. She will have (I know, since I know this secret) turned tear-damp and sore between her legs.

And: “Yes, I do know what you’ve done,” I say, using the voice she wants, and even _needs_ , to hear. “I know quite well, and you needn’t apologize. You need only never do it again.”

\--

Yes: I do know what she felt that moment when the ship exploded into flames and dragon-roared smoke, and she saw the flash of Cordé’s white dress before she was left lying on the ground, and she was dying, and it was days too late for her to have stopped it. She might have looked stern when she watched Typho record the message for Lieutenant Danlé’s parents informing them that their son had died in the line of duty, for the _glory of Naboo_ , but I know she would have cried if she had known how. I know what she felt when the older senators she ought to have looked up to turned to her and expected her to know the answers they wanted.

But she sits against my legs, in the messy wrinkles of my skirts, and I can tell she only wants to forget all of that—and I understand, and not because it has been my duty. I reach down and tangle my fingers in her hair.

Then I give it a little yanked tug, just enough to hurt, and it seems Anakin doesn’t know how to do this for her. “You need to tell me what you want.”

“Please,” she says, her breath coming out in a gasp. “I want you to--”

After a long dragged-slow moment, I push her away with my knees. Oh, I know what I would have wanted, once, before she met Anakin Skywalker again, and how I would have told her—but I can do no longer do that. She looks up at me, and I brush my fingertips over her mouth and: “Very well. Tell me what you want me to do.”

\--

When I leave Amidala, she is floating in the midst of sleep, wearing the choker of the pearl necklace. I return to my own room, where I take off her dress and leave it in a draped faint over the back of the corner armchair. My sheets smell like cold water, like melted snow, or the mountain lake where my family has a forest estate, when I get into bed. After I turn over onto my side to face the fursoft shadows away from the window, I close my eyes, and hope the rest of the night will be black and safe. If I dream, I know what I will have to see there.

She had wanted me to stay with her, but I couldn’t do that for her this time—or (though I have only admitted this in my whispered thoughts) any other time. It is the handmaiden’s first duty to know what her mistress needs. I can never forget that, even when she does.

Tomorrow morning, I will suggest she wear the pearls with her first gown for the day. She won’t have to go along with it, but I know she will.

*


End file.
